She soon realized that the imagery wasn’t exact: the threat – credible, corroborated, or whatever the hell they said – was from below, not above, in the subway, or would be once the bad people completed their plotting and gave the signal to begin. So it was more like a giant burrowing worm was underneath them all, another idea from an awful movie, that soon would suck them under and obliterate them – and they would have gone down not by accident but of their own accord, entered by a simple staircase, even paid for the privilege of being killed.
She thought it only added to the anxiety they all must feel everyday, entering the tunnels of a transportation system Allie would never in a million years want to take. Just thinking of the subway made her start to sweat more, and it wasn’t the sun, it was no longer that strong. The idea of being crammed next to all those people, nose to nose, nose to neck, zooming into oblivion, was bad enough on a normal day: now it seemed inconceivable.
Slowly, she started to see the people passing without pigment, as pale as ghosts – like zombies, that was it, their skin sallow, their eyes scooped out, their steps scary because they were so slow, dogged, and steady. Allie felt faint, or what she imagined was faintness because it was the first time she’d felt it, and she nearly fell into one of the cheap fold-out chairs Dan had set by the stand.
She thought she passed out for a while but she didn’t, she just sat there with her eyes closed for a minute. When she opened them again, the crowd pushing past was bigger than before and going the other way: it was the evening journey home from work.This was the second “big sales” period; there were two more hours before they could leave. Allie glanced at Dan, but he was counting change for customers, the radio now barely audible.There would be no fleeing early while he could still earn.
Everyone was doomed, and Allie realized that she wasn’t angry any more; for the first time, she could admit it, she was afraid. But since she had to be angry at someone, she decided to denounce those who would judge and condemn her fear: well, how else was she supposed to feel? What were they, crazy? This allowed her to cross over to this new emotion, as if using a rock in a river as her bridge to another bank.
When Allie focused on the crowd of the condemned again, to her surprise, she recognized a face.
She was sure that the boy from before was standing across the square. Was she imagining it or was he smiling at her and even coming closer? If she waved at him, would she be making a mortifying mistake and have to turn her wave into a hair comb, like a comic she’d seen on TV?
She wasn’t wrong: immediately, as if moving on an imaginary escalator, the boy was at her booth, standing right before her, they were no longer separated by a bungee cord or whatever wrapped around the fair. Each was on the inside now, and Allie felt safer just seeing him.
“So,” he said, “how’s business?”
Allie couldn’t answer: she had no idea, it seemed fine, busy, lots of bread had been sold, so she only shrugged and saw it was the right reply, he didn’t care, either, was just making conversation, needed an excuse to come back, and that made her smile at him, with her biggest and maybe only real smile of the day.
“I’m Sonny,” he said. Sorry? Ari? What had he said? It was obviously his name and she hadn’t heard it and within a second it would be too late to ask again, and then she never could – and there it was, it was too late, she’d never know.
Resigned to it, “I’m Allie,” she said, and at least the name she imagined he had sounded a little like hers, so that was something.
“You, do you work here or—”
“I come from a little upstate.” A little upstate? What did that mean? She couldn’t even speak English, how appealing was that?
“Look, uh – you going back right away, or —”
Was she? She had no idea, was not in control of her life – she turned to check with Dan, and he was at once selling a chocolate croissant to a lady too fat to be buying one and speaking on a cellphone crushed ridiculously between his shoulder and his tilted head, probably to his wife, who had gray hair Allie thought was way too long for her age.
When she turned back, she was aware that the boy could have seen again through her soaked shirt, her bra straps through the crude track team stick figures – she was completely exposed to him everywhere, and her mom’s sweater had long since fallen to the ground – but again his eyes were on hers and seemed never to have moved.
“I don’t know,” she said, and thought she sounded stupid, without a thought in her head, his worst image of someone from “a little upstate.”
“Well, maybe I could show you around – we could take a walk or something – see the city – I mean, if you feel like it.”
There was something in the way he said it – it went beyond his tentative quality, which was courteous, by the way, not clueless – that didn’t mean mere tourism; he was offering himself up as a companion in an unstable world currently under siege, at least that’s how she heard his idea, as a form of – not presumptuous or pushy but protective – partnership. If he’d intuited earlier that she was unhappy, now he knew that she was nervous; he was her link to something essential and real, not tricked-up like the city she believed they both were lost in.This made her agree to go and made Dan immediately a minor detail she could handle without really caring how.
“Let me just deal with this,” she said.
Dan was now off the phone and customer-free, so unfortunately he had a clear head with which to hear Allie’s request and in which to find a new cause for concern.
“But we’re going back soon,” he said, and then added something about Allie’s parents which this time she didn’t let sway her, as if she were ignoring an insult, and then he even mentioned the “alert,” which Allie couldn’t say but sensed that she alone would now be safe from. Assuring him that she would soon return and knew his cell phone number – actually, just yelling this back to him as she ran away – Allie was gone, the boy behind and then right beside her, Sonny or Ari, or whoever he was.
Enormously relieved, Allie found herself jabbering on to him – about her family, the whole college thing, her job, Dan, the city, the country, what she wanted from life – an explosion of honesty that was a working definition of trust, at least to her, who was wary of almost everyone. The boy said nothing yet still seemed to hear – a plus given how other boys just listened long enough to learn when you’d stop and let them start talking – and the crowds, no longer of zombies or horror movie victims but merely hot and harried people, seemed to part for them and let them pass.
Allie was talking so much that she didn’t notice where they were headed: across the pavement space of Union Square that led to, among other places, a park, a set of stores, and the wide thoroughfare of 14th Street.
None of them was where – with a brief but definitive touch of her arm – the boy signaled her to stop. When Allie looked up, people were no longer coming directly at them like rain on your windshield in a thunderstorm but were safely off to either side. She saw what they had reached: the entrance to the subway, the 4, 5, 6, N and R.
“What do you mean?” she asked, as if he had said something instead of simply stopping, and then she even smiled a little at the absurdity of what she saw.
“What’s the problem?” he said. “Haven’t you ever been on it?”
“No,” she said, inferring “of course not,” and how had he if he was just as innocent as she?
“Well, this is the day to do it,” he said, “with this phony alert – this is when it’ll be the most fun.”
Phony? It was as if his words were in a foreign tongue – or words you’ve repeated so many times they’re incoherent – and it took a while before Allie could turn them into words she knew. Suddenly, she understood: he was not like her, an alien visitor, he was the opposite: a native so steeped in this environment he knew its every corner and so cynical he could distinguish a false alarm from a real emergency – and laugh about it – and then go right into the teeth of where it was suppos
edly least safe.
Allie instinctively felt the cell phone in the little fanny pack tied about her waist (which of course tagged her as from out of town), then turned back to see the stand where Dan was waiting. But it was lost behind New Yorkers, as if they had closed over and consumed it, an experienced army that kills with one shot an amateur naïve enough to intrude on its territory.
When she turned back, the boy was beckoning her, his face promising only pleasure – no, nothing that profound, just dumb fun, and amazed she wouldn’t take the opportunity, how many would she ever have?
It was hard for Allie to go back to anger once she’d experienced fear – she’d left it on the other shore as it were, when she’d crossed over – and it was hard to feel fear once she’d experienced trust. She was young, younger than most people her age, and so insecure that she held onto every emotion fiercely until she could find a new reason all by herself to release it. With whom would she be safer, someone as ignorant as she or someone who knew the city better than anyone else? Of course – what were you, nuts?
So she let the boy guide her gently toward and down the stairs.
Immediately, it was like hell – so many steamy people on the narrow staircase you could take only tiny steps, orderly enough going up and down on either side, until someone decided to breach the boundary and cross over and then all became chaos. The boy preceded her and, in the crush, her hand slipped from his and she grabbed onto the back of his belt, a gesture more intimate than she’d intended and one that made her fingers touch for a second the bare small of his back before she could loop them on the leather again. His skin was cool and covered in a thin down of hair as dark as everything else about him – except for his eyes, which she had only now noticed were blue-green and shone as bright as an animal’s from its den when they’re the only things you see. Soon they reached the floor of the station and the last sight of any sun vanished; there was no reversing course, at least not without her clawing through that crowd again and alone, for he was obviously committed to continuing.
“Come on,” he said. “This way.”
Holding her hand again, he weaved expertly through an onslaught of other people as if he was a white water rafter and they the waves, or some other image from “a little upstate” she clutched to keep calm. In truth, there was nothing from the natural world about what he did: he was more like a video game player entering and ace-ing an invented environment, evading all enemies, and since she had never played before, what had been trust became total and utter dependence; she could not make a move without him.
They passed a table where police were opening and examining the bags of commuters, supposedly at random but really targeting young and attractive women. Allie heard her companion scoff, seeing this – saying “right” with a special spitting take on the “t” – before tugging her hand harder.
“Down here,” he said, and they went – it was possible! – even lower.
Descending to the next level, Allie again held onto his belt, but this time she intentionally dipped her fingers over it and onto him, curling them so she’d rub against and feel his hair and scratching him a little when she did, in a way that could have been deliberate or not, he’d never know. How could she not want to become closer to him when he was all she had and without him she was literally lost?
Soon they had no choice but be inseparable, for there was no room at the base of the stairs to edge apart. So many people waited for a train to come down the track that they milled in a giant mass, stuck together with sweat and the stink of themselves. Her front pressed against the boy’s back, and since he wore a white T-shirt, too, it was as if she had partly disappeared into him, like the invisible man does into things in other, older movies.
If something exploded now, there would be no saving anyone, each person would be propelled into and annihilate his neighbor. But Sari knew it was nonsense and there was nothing to worry about; he remained almost dry on the damp platform; she noticed it when, with absolute ease, he brought her arm around him onto his stomach and held her hand there; and her heart beat so powerfully she was sure he must feel it: they were so connected now her heart was pumping into his.
Then, from a distance, the track was illuminated. They all stirred, like refugees hit by a spotlight, their emotions ranging from anticipation to relief to fear.The ground started rumbling and Allie suddenly held the boy’s hand tighter, her fingers wrapping around his palm.
“Here we go,” he said.
The sound grew louder, the light became brighter, it seemed as if the station itself was about to erupt, no bombs were even needed. Then the rumble was joined by a shriek of gears that hurt her ears and what seemed a hysterical, high-pitched, mechanical scream from a new gizmo that could feel and express pain. Allie saw the “R” of the train cab come at and pass her, blowing up her hair, the letter seeming to stand for some place mysterious, a final destination far in the future where there were only letters and no names. The train lasted forever before it finally stopped, the doors opened, and there was no turning back.
Allie saw that inside there was already no room. Each seat was filled and riders jammed the aisles, pressed together in brightly colored summer clothes, like the roasted peppers in that unopened jar in her mother’s kitchen. Allie imagined it was impossible each had enough air, but what was there was cool and that was something, a seductive reason to get on and stay.
And they did get on, all of them – even if someone had wanted to walk away, he couldn’t, there was no way out. Allie felt the new people must make the train bulge out from its sides, as in a cartoon – but, amazingly, it maintained its shape as they added to what could not be increased.
She and the boy managed to make it to – or merely were rammed toward – a middle pole, which Allie grabbed onto as if it were a floating relic of a shipwreck that kept her from being swept away. She wrapped herself around it and, from behind, the boy wrapped around her, and Allie felt this was the last place they would ever be, they could never leave and would have to live there.
They waited for what seemed an unbearably long time, the cool air slowly being diluted and polluted by the hot air from the platform, which seeped in like poison and threatened their survival. Then, after an almost comical ding-dong of a make-believe bell, the doors coughed and stuttered and finally closed.
Their savage peeling into the dark of the tunnel made her cry out, once, weakly, not sure she made a sound; but since Sari had promised, she was certain it was no longer death they were racing to find, and her freedom from fear was like discovering a second, braver self, and it was thrilling in a new and startling way.
As they left any recognizable place and were imprisoned at high speed in a tube, Allie’s cries grew louder, became a kind of moan, and she scanned the signs overhead that told her of the system’s origins to center herself somewhere, anywhere, in space.
It was then that she became aware of the hands at her side and felt one hand, his hand, moving slowly and determinedly beneath her short denim skirt with the sparkly studs she thought so cute until it reached the rose (was that what it was?) that bridged her thighs.
“I want to hold all your flowers,” he whispered, and then his other hand moved to encircle and squeeze her right breast, the cup of the bra covered by its own bud. (He had seen her! How had it happened without his even sneaking a peek? Was it a bizarre gift all boys had or had he merely looked so cleverly he hadn’t been caught?) Then he kissed gently at her neck and said, almost with sorrow, “I wish I had a hundred hands to hold all your flowers,” and his fingers moved under her panties, as if burrowing to the place from which the rose had grown.
He put one, then two, then three fingers inside her, and Allie was ashamed and grateful that she was growing wet, and she moaned more and, never having done this before, darkness all around her, her death no longer imminent, moved her hand down amid all the other hands to press him in deeper. Then she got so wet his fingers fell in to their knuckles, and he caught her nip
ple between the first and second fingers of his other hand, as if he were using a soft scissors to snip it or something. She couldn’t think straight, it was all connected – the flower – like she and the boy were connected, and she leaned her head back so her cheek was on his, and she came, which only ever happened to her when she was alone, using that old embroidered pillow her parents had given her as a tenth birthday gift.
“This stop is Times Square,” someone who wasn’t real announced.
It was every man for himself now – no more of one mind, some in the car struck out on their own, showing little concern for those who stayed behind, indeed using their arms and legs as springboards or stepladders to get out the door. Disentangling from each other, Allie and Sari were soon among this exiting and unsentimental group, though Allie whispered “excuse me” to a woman she practically jabbed unconscious with her elbow, a courtesy attributable to a country upbringing not yet as far behind her as Union Square.
“Let’s go uptown,” the boy said.
Soon there was a new platform and more new people – would she ever see the same face twice in New York? Allie wondered. (In her own town, even the guy at the gas station remembered she’d been a colicky child.) Well, of course you would: she had seen the boy again, as clear as if she’d conjured him; if she’d hadn’t so desired, he would have disappeared. This was another truth about the city: you could work your will on it just as it did a job on you. If it called an alert, you could become awake in your own way; it was a contest of wills that anyone could enter, even Allie.
Now it was as if the boy and she were starting something over – was it their lives? as big as that? – because the new train they fought to board was numbered 1, the first of its kind. It was just as jammed, and they quickly laid claim to the same center pole, the way an old couple always had the same seats in the movie theater back home and resented you irrationally if you had the temerity to sit there.
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